HiRISE’s Beagle 2 Detective Story
On Christmas Day 2003, the British lander Beagle 2 entered Mars’ atmosphere and was never heard from again. It had hitchhiked a ride off of ESA’s Mars Express orbiter. The lander successfully departed Mars Express and then nothing. Mars is hard, and many a spacecraft has ended in demise trying to orbit around or land on the red planet. Beagle 2 never phoned home. Its fate was unknown.
This is before the arrival of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and its high resolution HiRISE camera. MRO entered orbit in 2006 and is the highest resolution imager sent to a planet in our Solar System. Now a days it is used to capture the descent of Phoenix lander and Curiosity rover (which is a challenging feat in itself), but that information gives a glimpse of what was going on if something goes awry in those 7 minutes of terror of landing, entry and descent. Later it can be used to to spot the lander on the surface. But the only image of Beagle2 at the time of its’ landing attempt is the separation image from it’s mothership Mars Express.
Departing image snapped by the VMC camera aboard Mars Express after Beagle 2 separated and was on its way to the Martian surface on December 2003 Image Credit: ESA – European Space Agency
For 12 years it’s fate wasn’t known. HiRISE can resolve objects down to the size of a small card table on Mars’ surface. The predicted landing ellipse for Beagle 2 was imaged by HiRISE and scientists scoured the images looking for something in essence not red. They looked for something bright and shiny in the images that could be Beagle 2. And they succeed. A few days ago, ESA and NASA announced that the Beagle 2 and its used parachute had been found.
The British lander wasn’t found in pieces scattered across the surface. It was intact. It had successfully landed on the surface. A huge accomplishment and success for the United Kingdom. They stuck the landing but the deployment had some hitch preventing Beagle 2 from communicating with Earth.With HiRISE’s resolution, the images reveal the rough outline of the lander. Beagle 2 had a petal design. All the petals had to deploy for the communications antenna to be exposed and able to send/receive signals. It appears that Beagle 2 only partially deployed (a broken cable, an air bag that didn’t inflate or deflate, a rock underneath could be one of the multitude of reasons that could have prevented the final panels from unfurling), with that vital communications antenna blocked it ended the mission.
We now know what happened to Beagle 2 that Christmas Day back at 2003. Learning the British spacecraft landed successfully will help engineer future European Mars missions. I also think the ending to this detective story serves as a reminder for how powerful the HiRISE camera is. Of the imagers aboard spacecraft orbiting Mars now and in the past, HiRISE is the only instrument capable of spotting Beagle 2. It’s with its keen eyes that it resolves the hundreds of thousands of fans dotting the South Pole of Mars that we ask for your help to map at http://www.planetfour.org
Using Tag Groups to Collect Images on Talk
More on making tagged group collections from the Darren on the Zooniverse blog
Hashtags are an important element of how the current generation of Zooniverse’s Talk discussion system* helps to power citizen science. By adding hashtags to the short comments left directly on classification objects, users can help each other (and the science teams) find certain types of objects—for instance, a #leopard on Snapshot Serengeti, #frost on Planet Four, or a #curved-band on Cyclone Center. (As on Twitter, hashtags on Talk are generated using the # symbol.)
One of the ways in which zooites can take advantage of hashtags is by using Talk’s tag group feature. A tag group (also called a “keyword collection”) is a collection that automatically populates with all of the objects that have been given a specific hashtag by a volunteer.
For instance, here is a Galaxy Zoo tag group that populates with all Galaxy Zoo objects that have been tagged #starforming. It will continue to automatically add new…
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Summer Has Come to the Martian South Pole
Like the Earth, Mars is tilted on its axis which produces seasons: Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter just like the Earth has. It’s during the Spring and early Summer in the South Pole (and in dunes in the Northern hemisphere), that the fans and blotches that you map in the images in the classification interface appear.
Solar insolation over its orbit – Image credit: http://www-mars.lmd.jussieu.fr/mars/time/solar_longitude.html
Yesterday marked the official start of Summer on the South Pole of Mars and the shortest day of the year in the Martian Southern Hemisphere. The carbon dioxide ice sheet that once covered places like Inca City, Manhattan, and Ithaca should be gone or nearly gone at this point. The dark fans and blotches imaged by HiRISE in August-November of last year (and you can now map those images from Inca City in that sequence on the site) have now disappeared back into the regolith. The days will begin to get shorter and the HiRISE seasonal monitoring campaign will eventually switch to the Northern hemisphere. But the geysers and fans will be back in the South and so will the HiRISE images starting around mid 2016.
In the meantime, we’ve got plenty of images of fans and blotches needing your help to map at http://www.planetfour.org
Brand New Images of Inca City!
For the past while we’ve been focusing on Inca City, and now we have even more images for you to explore. As our way of saying thanks for the hard work and time you put into Planet Four over the past two years, we’ve uploaded the 6 HiRISE images (find out more in here and here) that were publicly released by our friends on the HiRISE team based on your vote back in August.
The cutouts shown on Planet Four are HiRISE images are nearly as close to right off the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as we can get. These observations span from this past August,when the sun began to rise about the horizon ( the start of the Season 5 monitoring campaign), to as recent as November of last year.
The images will add to our understanding of the South Pole and its seasonal processes. We have already Season1-3 of Inca City classified thanks to your help. The science team is working now on analyzing those results. We have Season 4 and now 5 of Inca City soon to come with your clicks. These new images will expand the baseline we have on the behavior of the geysers,fans, and blotches to 5 Martian years.
If you have a moment or two to spare, please help by mapping fans and blotches today at http://www.planetfour.org.
Happy 2nd Birthday Planet Four
It has been two years since we went public with the Planet Four citizen science project. Our volunteers (you!) have been amazing. We hope you enjoy looking at these images of Mars, taken of very non-earthly terrain. One of my favorite things to do is to visit the chat boards on Talk. I enjoy reading the conversations and seeing you all interacting.
Please know that your efforts are very much appreciated! We are working on our first scientific publication. We have had some technical challenges to solve, but I think that after this first paper the others will flow more quickly. Meanwhile we continue to collect great data and lengthen our time span of observations.
Believe it or not we are hoping for another large dust storm. We have ideas about interannual variability in the weather on Mars and how that affects the seasonal activity. But we need another dust storm and then another period of recovery to test our hypotheses.
Some of you have wondered when we might start putting out images of spring in the northern hemisphere to analyze. We’d like to be sure we have the problems on our end solved, and we have ideas about how to improve your interface to the images. So it will be a while yet, but it is definitely something I’d like to see happen!
Candy Hansen
Planet Four Principal Investigator
Help celebrate Planet Four’s birthday by mapping fans and blotches today at http://www.planetfour.org
Happy New Earth Year
Happy New Earth Year, Earthlings! Thanks for all of your help this year. If you’re a Martian, you’ll have to wait another few months (June 18, 2015 to be exact) to celebrate Mars Year 32 drawing to a close . That’s because Mars takes nearly twice as long ( 687 days) as the Earth to complete one revolution around the Sun. To mark another Earth year of Planet Four, we have gathered together some favorite images suggested on Talk. Enjoy!
Planet Four Blog 